Category: Main Crew

George White

These entries usually start with the subject’s birth name and dates, but that is problematic with George White. Some sources claim he was Eassy White (1892-1968), born in New York. Others say he was George Weitz (1892-1968), born in Toronto. All we know for sure is that the dates are pretty certain.

White started out as a dancer in burlesque theatres, and worked his way up to the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. This inspired him to become a producer at the age of 27, launching his own Follies knock-off, George White’s Scandals in 1919. He continued with the format until 1939.

White also produced book-based Broadway shows, including Flying High (1931). It was typical of the early days of sound that MGM invited him, someone with no background in or knowledge of films, to go to Hollywood and produce a screen version of the hit musical comedy.

He continued working in Hollywood from time to time, even directing an eponymous musical based around his Broadway show.

White’s career took a downturn in the late thirties, culminating in a prison sentence in 1947 for being the driver in a fatal hit-and-run incident.

July 10, 2026

Flying High

The Crew

Charles F Reisner	Director
Charles F Reisner	Adaptation
Andrew Percival Younger	Screenplay
Robert E Hopkins	Aditional Dialogue
Buddy G DeSylva	Lyricist
Lew Brown	Lyricist
Ray Henderson	Composer
Dorothy Fields	Lyricist
Jimmy McHugh	Composer
William Axt	Composer
Charles Maxwell	Orchestrator
George White	Producer
Merritt B Gerstad	Cinematographer
William S Gray	Editor
Cedric Gibbons	Art Director
Adrian	Costume Designer
Douglas Shearer	Sound Recording Director
Ralph Shugart	Sound Recording Engineer
Busby Berkeley	Choreographer
Sandy Roth	Assistant Director (uncredited)

July 10, 2026

Gus Arnheim

Gustavus Arnheim (1897-1955) was a band leader and songwriter, whose most lasting composition was ‘I Cried for You’, written in 1923, with Abe Lyman and Arthur Freed.

Arnheim started out as a pianist, working for a time as accompanist to Sophie Tucker. He set up his own orchestra in 1927.

Arnheim and his band appeared in Vitaphone shorts in 1928-29 before making their feature debut in Universal’s Broadway in 1929. The orchestra was in about a dozen pictures, one of which was Metro’s Flying High. They also showed up in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932).

‘I Cried for You’ was sung by Judy Garland in Babes in Arms, by Helen Forrest in Bathing Beauty and, briefly, by Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. Arnheim’s song ‘Sweet and Lovely’ was ‘performed’ by June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven in Two Girls and a Sailor, with the voices of Virginia Rees and Dorothy Jackson.

July 7, 2026
René Hubert

During a forty-year career, Rene Hubert (1895-1976) designed costumes for films made in France, the UK and Hollywood.

Born in Switzerland, Hubert is less well-remembered than contemporaries such as Orry-Kelly and Edith Head. But he worked on dozens of prestige pictures and dressed many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. His pictures included The Wind (1928), Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), Shanghai Express (1931), À Nous la Liberté (1931), Liliom (1934), Rembrandt (1936), Things to Come (1936), Lady Hamilton (1941), The Song of Bernadette (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Anastasia (1956).

In 1931, Hubert designed costumes for tramps and gowns for Esther Ralston in The Prodigal.

July 2, 2026
Jacques Wolfe

Jacques Leon Wolfe (1896-1973) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the United States and became fascinated by African-American music.

Trained at Juillard, Wolfe did extensive research into the history of Black music in the United States, both as folk song and spiritual, and started to incorporate it into his own compositions. This led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes, in which Wolfe set to music Hughes’s poem Homesick Blues (1927) as ‘Sad Song in De Air’.

Wolfe is credited with Herbert Stothart and Howard Johnson at the beginning of The Prodigal. Three songs are performed by Lawrence Tibbett and unidentified Black singers in the nighttime party sequence. Given that these are in Black dialect, it is likely that Wolfe made a significant contribution to the lyrics and music. Some online sources credit only Stothart and Johnson. What is certain is that Tibbett recorded Wolfe’s ‘The Glory Road’, but the number was not included in the final version of the film.

July 2, 2026
John Howard Payne

John Howard Payne (1791-1852) was an American poet, actor, dramatist, lyricist and, for the last ten years of his life, diplomat.

He also studied the history of the Cherokee people, lobbied for their better treatment and, from left field, supported the theory that they were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

Payne’s lasting legacy is the song ‘Home! Sweet Home!’, written with Henry Bishop and sung in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Sweethearts, Let Freedom Ring and Cairo.

July 2, 2026
Henry Bishop

Henry Rowley Bishop (1787-1856) was a British composer from the Romantic period who composed for ballet and opera. He was a founder member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Bishop’s lasting legacy was the ballad ‘Home! Sweet Home!’, written with American John Howard Payne for the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan (1823). The song was performed in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Sweethearts, Let Freedom Ring and Cairo.

July 2, 2026
Billy Rose

William Samuel Rosenberg (1899-1966) became familiar to audiences in 1975 when he was played by James Caan in Funny Lady, a film about Fanny Brice, to whom Rose was married for nine years. In the mid-20th century, however, he was one of the biggest impresarios on Broadway.

Rose started out as a stenographer, playing an important role during the First World War as a senior clerk at the War Industries Board. After the war, he started writing song lyrics, and eventually became the co-writer of many standards, including ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, ‘Don’t Bring Lulu’ and ‘Me and My Shadow’. It should be noted, however, that Rose was an enormously successful self-publicist, and doubt has been cast on the extent of his contribution in song-writing partnerships.

Inevitably, given his ego, Rose moved into Broadway producing. One of his biggest hits was Jumbo (1936), which was filmed by MGM in 1962. Rose played no part in the production of the film, but a contractual requirement meant that it was titled Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

As an impresario, Rose was known for glitz and vulgarity, but also for giving an early opportunity as choreographer to Gene Kelly, and for staging Carmen Jones in 1943 with an all-Black cast.

Numbers co-written by Billy Rose were used in The Prodigal and Hit the Deck.

July 2, 2026
Edward Eliscu

Edward Eliscu (1902-98) was multi-talented, an actor, writer, producer and lyricist.

After graduating from university, Eliscu became an actor, securing roles on Broadway. He began writing songs, and in 1929 teamed up with Vincent Youmans and Billy Rose to write the musical Great Day. This included the number ‘Without a Song’, which was sung beautifully by Lawrence Tibbett in MGM’s The Prodigal.

Eliscu also began contributing songs to film scores, after being invited to Hollywood by Nacio Herb Brown. He scored a hit with the first big Astaire and Rogers number, ‘Carioca’ in Flying Down to Rio. He also co-wrote a number in Hit the Deck.

Eliscu’s stage revue Meet the People was a big success in Hollywood in 1939, “an exhortation to Hollywood to come out of its cocoon and realize what was going on in the rest of the world”. None of his work was retained in MGM’s 1944 film of the same name.

Eliscu’s career in Hollywood ended when he was one of the many people named to HUAC by Martin Berkeley. But he continued to work productively back in New York. He served for five years as president of the Songwriters Guild of America.

July 2, 2026
Vincent Youmans

Vincent Millie Youmans (1898-1946) was a prolific Tin Pan Alley composer. Not a lot of his work is remembered today, but he did write a handful of hardy perennials.

At the level of individual songs, Youmans wrote the music for ‘I Want to Be Happy’ and ‘Tea for Two’. Of his stage musicals, No, No, Nanette (1927) has endured.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not use a lot of Youman’s work, but he did compose the beautiful ‘Without a Song’ for The Prodigal. His 1927 Broadway hit Hit the Deck was filmed by MGM in 1955, with many of Youmans’s numbers retained.

Probably the most frequently revived screen musical with Youmans’s music is RKO’s proto-Astaire/Rogers picture Flying Down to Rio (1933).

July 1, 2026